Militarized weaponry is being used to trample constitutional rights.

The
militarized police force unleashed in Ferguson, Missouri over the past
two weeks has crushed the civil liberties of black residents angry over
the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. That law enforcement has shown
utter disregard for the rights of protesters and the press is no
surprise to many, especially black people, who have had to contend with
pervasive surveillance and harassment in varied forms for much of
American history. Yet what makes the situation in Ferguson look
especially scary and dystopic are the militarized weapons being used to
crush constitutional rights.

The first civil liberty to
be trampled on by cops was the right to protest, or as the Constitution
puts it, “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” Protests have
occurred almost daily since August 9, the day Brown was killed by
Ferguson officer Darren Wilson. When demonstrations broke out over the
shooting, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets and used vehicles
that produce piercing sounds to disperse the crowd.

In the wake of these scenes, groups like Human Rights Watch have charged
that the methods law enforcement used have intimidated peaceful
demonstrators. “Ferguson police are compounding problems with threats
and the use of unnecessary force against people peacefully protesting
the police killing of Michael Brown,” Human Rights Watch’s U.S.
researcher Alba Morales said in a statement. “They should be upholding
basic rights to peaceful assembly and free speech, not undermining
them.”

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, and Daria Roithmayr, a law professor, argue that
excessive tear gas and rubber bullets also violate the constitutional
right to due process. “The due process clause bans the police from using
excessive force even when they are within their rights to control a
crowd or arrest a suspect,” they write.

Despite this criticism, the police in Ferguson have not changed their tactics.

When
citizens with camera phones and journalists have tried to document
police tactics, officers have sought to prevent them from doing so. The
American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of a journalist
who was told by police to stop recording with his camera. On August 15, the police and the ACLU reached an agreement that would allow the videotaping of police officers as long as officers are able to do their jobs.

After Mike Brown's shooting, an alliance of left and right emerged to demilitarize police. But here's what it's not

Heather Digby PartonTuesday, Aug 19, 2014

One
of the most misunderstood elements of American politics has to be the
fact that legislative coalitions are very different from voting
coalitions. The most obvious case in point is the erroneous assumption
that the coalition that often forms around civil liberties, featuring
elements of the most ideologically committed members of the left and the
right, means that these groups are in agreement as to the goals they
wish to obtain. It’s not essential that everyone who signs on to a bill
is doing so for the same reason, but it’s vitally important that people
not misinterpret the joint action as a sign that we are entering a
moment of bipartisan kumbaya that will heal the nation’s wounds and
bring us together once and for all.

In the wake of Michael Brown’s death and all that’s followed, we are seeing this play out in what Jim Newell accurately described as
a potential coalition of right and left on the demilitarization of the
police. In this case it’s the hardcore wingnuts at the Gun Owners of
America joining in with the ACLU to demand an end to the Pentagon
program that encourages police departments to buy surplus military
equipment at bargain basement prices, both of whom have endorsed a bill
by Democratic congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia to do just that. But
it’s important that we distinguish that the liberty concerns driving
this particular joint endorsement are not coming from the same place or
seeking the same end.

Gun Owners of America president Larry Pratt
is not concerned about the police harassing and shooting young
African-American men or using military tactics and equipment against
peaceful protesters exercising their rights under the Constitution. He
has never before expressed any concern for these issues in the past.
What he is worried about is something else entirely. Just a few weeks
ago he appeared on Alex Jones’ conspiracy show and articulated exactly
what it is he fears the most. Right Wing Watch captured the moment:

Jones
asked Pratt about a Washington Times report about a 2010 Pentagon
directive — an update to a series of similar directives crafted under
previous administrations — outlining how and when the military can use
force to quell domestic unrest “in extraordinary emergency circumstances
where prior authorization by the president is impossible.”

Jones,
of course, read this to mean that it is “official and has been
confirmed” that the military is “training with tanks, armored vehicles,
drones” to “take on the American people, mainly the Tea Party.”

Cornel
West is a professor at Union Theological Seminary and one of my
favorite public intellectuals, a man who deals in penetrating analyses
of current events, expressed in a pithy and highly quotable way.

I
first met him nearly six years ago, while the financial crisis and the
presidential election were both under way, and I was much impressed by
what he had to say. I got back in touch with him last week, to see how
he assesses the nation’s progress since then.

The conversation
ranged from Washington, D.C., to Ferguson, Missouri, and although the
picture of the nation was sometimes bleak, our talk ended on a
surprising note.

Last time we talked it was almost six
years ago. It was a panel discussion The New Yorker magazine had set up,
it was in the fall of 2008, so it was while the financial crisis was
happening, while it was actually in progress. The economy was crumbling
and everybody was panicking. I remember you speaking about the
financial crisis in a way that I thought made sense. There was a lot of
confusion at the time. People didn’t know where to turn or what was
going on.

I also remember, and this is just me
I’m talking about, being impressed by Barack Obama who was running for
president at the time. I don’t know if you and I talked about him on
that occasion. But at the time, I sometimes thought that he looked like
he had what this country needed.

So that’s my
first question, it’s a lot of ground to cover but how do you feel things
have worked out since then, both with the economy and with this
president? That was a huge turning point, that moment in 2008, and my
own feeling is that we didn’t turn.

No, the thing is he
posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up
with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security
presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free.
The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war
criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a
progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious
injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another
neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair. And
that’s a very sad moment in the history of the nation because we
are—we’re an empire in decline. Our culture is in increasing decay. Our
school systems are in deep trouble. Our political system is
dysfunctional. Our leaders are more and more bought off with legalized
bribery and normalized corruption in Congress and too much of our civil
life. You would think that we needed somebody—a Lincoln-like figure who
could revive some democratic spirit and democratic possibility.

Ferguson
is not just about systemic racism — it's about class warfare and how
America's poor are held back, says Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Will the
recent rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, be a tipping point in the struggle
against racial injustice, or will it be a minor footnote in some future
grad student’s thesis on Civil Unrest in the Early Twenty-First
Century?

The answer can be found in May of 1970.

You
probably have heard of the Kent State shootings: on May 4, 1970, the
Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State
University. During those 13 seconds of gunfire, four students were
killed and nine were wounded, one of whom was permanently paralyzed. The
shock and outcry resulted in a nationwide strike of 4 million students
that closed more than 450 campuses. Five days after the shooting,
100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C. And the nation’s youth
was energetically mobilized to end the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and
mindless faith in the political establishment.

You probably haven’t heard of the Jackson State shootings.

On
May 14th, 10 days after Kent State ignited the nation, at the
predominantly black Jackson State University in Mississippi, police
killed two black students (one a high school senior, the other the
father of an 18-month-old baby) with shotguns and wounded twelve others.

There
was no national outcry. The nation was not mobilized to do anything.
That heartless leviathan we call History swallowed that event whole,
erasing it from the national memory.

And, unless we want the
Ferguson atrocity to also be swallowed and become nothing more than an
intestinal irritant to history, we have to address the situation not
just as another act of systemic racism, but as what else it is: class
warfare.

By focusing on just the racial aspect, the discussion
becomes about whether Michael Brown’s death—or that of the other three
unarmed black men who were killed by police in the U.S. within that
month—is about discrimination or about police justification. Then we’ll
argue about whether there isn’t just as much black-against-white racism
in the U.S. as there is white-against-black. (Yes, there is. But, in
general, white-against-black economically impacts the future of the
black community. Black-against-white has almost no measurable social
impact.)

Will you be ready for the life of a nomad, permanently in search of temporary work?

In a must-read article in the current issue of Harper's
magazine, journalist Jessica Bruder, adjunct professor at Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism, adds a new phrase to America's
vocabulary: "Elderly migrant worker." She documents a growing trend of
older Americans for whom the reality of unaffordable housing and
scarcity of work has driven them from their homes and onto the road in
search of seasonal and temporary employment across the country. Packed
into RVs, detached from their communities, these "Okies" of the Great
Recession put in time at Amazon warehouses, farms and amusement parks,
popping free over-the-counter pain reliever to mask the agony of
strained muscles and sore backs. And when they can't hold up any longer?
The RV sometimes becomes a coffin.

Since the financial
crisis ripped the security out from under millions of people, the bulk
of our politicians, including President Obama, actually tried to reduce,
rather than increase, Social Security. The absence of pensions, along
with the inadequacy of 401(k)s, skyrocketing healthcare and job
insecurity and unemployment, are sending more and more people scrambling
to figure out a way to keep body and soul together. Even grandparents
are joining the ranks of those for whom life has become a game of Survivor. In an email interview, I asked Bruder about this alarming trend and what it means for the country, now and in the future.

Lynn
Parramore: In your recent article in Harper’s, you describe a trend of
downwardly mobile elderly folks traveling the country in RVs in search
of temporary and seasonal work. How many people are we talking about?
How fast has this trend been emerging?

Jessica Bruder:
Though no one keeps an official tally of how many older Americans are
doing this kind of work, their ranks appear to be growing rapidly in the
wake of the housing bust and market crashes.

Amazon first hired a
handful of migrant full-time RVers in 2008 through a program the
company later named “CamperForce.” As of 2014, it had expanded to employ
some 2,000 workers, according to a recruiter I met in Quartzsite,
Arizona. The American Crystal Sugar Company taps the same labor pool
each fall to staff its annual sugar beet harvest, and their recruitment
numbers are up, too. This year, they’re hoping to recruit 600 " workampers," up from 450 the year before.

LP: What’s the gender breakdown among these traveling workers? What kinds of work are men and women doing?

JB:
I was impressed by how many older, single women I met among the working
nomads, from a tarot reader living in a former convict labor van she’d
transformed into a roving gypsy boudoir, to an ex-medical technician who
managed to fit her whole life—along with a Shih-Tzu, a lovebird and a
loquacious African Grey parrot—into a 10.5-foot Carson Kalispell sport
trailer.

The gender breakdown was roughly even. Employers don’t
discriminate when doling out hard or dirty work, whether it’s scrubbing
campsite toilets or walking 15 miles a day on a concrete warehouse floor
to pack Amazon’s holiday orders.

The self-serving con of neoliberalism is that it has eroded the human values the market was supposed to emancipate

To
be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can
be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at
peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an
honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with
life. It calls on you not to be ashamed.

I was prompted to write
it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian
professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe. What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society
is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently
distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening
to us and why.

We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our
identities are shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other
people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own
abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to
make people comply or to exclude them if they don’t.

Today the
dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in
Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can
resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the
state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public
services should be privatised, public spending should be cut, and
business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the
UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35
years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power. It is rapidly colonising
the rest of the world.

Verhaeghe points out that neoliberalism
draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed
by a state of nature it calls the market) and on the Christian idea
that humankind is inherently selfish and acquisitive. Rather than
seeking to suppress these characteristics, neoliberalism celebrates
them: it claims that unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest,
leads to innovation and economic growth, enhancing the welfare of all.

At
the heart of this story is the notion of merit. Untrammelled
competition rewards people who have talent, work hard, and innovate. It
breaks down hierarchies and creates a world of opportunity and mobility.

The
reality is rather different. Even at the beginning of the process, when
markets are first deregulated, we do not start with equal
opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before the
starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to
acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren’t, on the
whole, the most talented, hardworking or innovative people, but those
with the fewest scruples, the most thugs, and the best contacts – often
in the KGB.

Friday, August 22, 2014

GAZA CITY — One day after an intelligence coup enabled Israel to kill three top commanders
of Hamas’s armed wing, as many as 18 Palestinians suspected of
collaboration with Israel were summarily executed in public on Friday,
in what was seen as a warning to the people of the Gaza Strip.

Masked
gunmen in matching black T-shirts and pants paraded seven of the
suspected collaborators, handcuffed and hooded, to their deaths before a
boisterous crowd outside a downtown mosque after noon prayers, in a
highly theatrical presentation. Photographs showed a pair of militants
leaning over a doomed man on his knees against a wall, and masses of men
and boys cheering and clamoring for a better view.

The
Palestinians killed on Friday were not identified, but they were
reported to have been arrested for or convicted of collaboration, a
crime punishable by death under Palestinian law, before this summer’s
bloody battles between Israel and Hamas, the militant Islamist movement
that dominates Gaza.

“I
think this has provoked, and let’s say triggered, this process,” said
Hamdi Shaqqura, deputy director of the Palestinian Center for Human
Rights, a Gaza group that has long monitored and condemned such
extrajudicial killings. “If you speak to any regular citizen in Gaza,
nobody is looking with mercy on these people. Why? Because people are
being bombarded. A lot of the blame for bombardment of specific places
is being put on collaborators.”

Al
Majd, a website managed by the Internal Security Service of the Hamas
government that ran Gaza until June, warned that future collaborators
would be dealt with in the field, not in courthouses, to create
deterrence.

"An uncritical endorsement of high self-esteem may be counterproductive and even dangerous."

“The
whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” —Bertrand Russell

Is
low self-esteem all that bad? Self-loathing is. But between
self-loathing and narcissism is a vast spectrum comprising infinitely
various degrees of self-regard. Neither extreme is good. If only we
could just reach medium.

In 1986, California state assembly member
John Vasconcellos proposed the State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem.
This ignited a new movement: Based on the notion that low self-esteem
caused every kind of social woe from teenage pregnancy to low test
scores and high dropout rates, school curricula and parenting techniques
were radically transformed, their main objective now being to cultivate
high self-esteem among the young, which activists proclaimed would cure
those social woes and make America a safer, happier, and better place. A
multibillion-dollar industry surged around self-esteem. Kids were
taught to make “me” flags of their putative “me” nations, to view
history and fiction through the filter of their feelings, and to start schooldays with affirmations such as I always make good choices and Everyone is happy to see me.

The aftermath has not worked out as planned. Since 1986, self-esteem among young people has
increased. Studies show that students hold themselves in higher regard
than students in decades past. But to the shock and horror of the
self-esteem movement’s boosters, soaring self-esteem has done nothing to
stem crime, addiction and those other ills the boosters claimed high
self-esteem would stem. In fact, ambient sky-high self-esteem might
present new problems of its own: One long-term study found that college
students are now twice as narcissistic as college students were in 1982;
other studies link high self-esteem with high rates of aggression, territorialism, elitism, racism, and other negative qualities.

“Certain
forms of high self-esteem seem to increase one’s proneness to violence,”
reads one report published in the journal of the American Psychological
Association. “An uncritical endorsement of the cultural value of high
self-esteem may therefore be counterproductive and even dangerous. The
societal pursuit of high self-esteem for everyone may literally end up
doing considerable harm.”

Non-Jewish
spouses of Israeli homosexuals can now obtain citizenship under an
interior ministry decision applicable since Tuesday.

“The same-sex
partner of a person eligible for the law of return, and who does not
live in Israel, may also become Israeli,” a ministry statement said,
adding that the ruling applies only to married same-sex couples.

Under the law of return, any Jew has the right to ask for, and to be granted, Israeli citizenship.That right also extends to the partner of the applicant, but had previously been granted only to heterosexual couples.

“Israel’s
doors are now open to any Jew and his family, without discrimination
based on lifestyle,” Interior Minister Gideon Saar said in a statement.

The
Jewish state is considered a trailblazer in the promotion of and
respect for gay rights, especially in terms of adoption for same-sex
couples.

However, civil marriage does not exist in Israel, where
the solemnisation of marriage is entirely controlled by the state
rabbinate, and homosexual unions are not in themselves recognised.

Tell me again how wonderful Islam is. From Huffington Post:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/09/women-stoned-adultery-syria_n_5664828.html?utm_hp_ref=twBy Bassem Mroue08/09/2014BEIRUT
(AP) — A cleric read the verdict before the truck came and dumped a
large pile of stones near the municipal garden. Jihadi fighters then
brought in the woman, clad head to toe in black, and put her in a small
hole in the ground. When residents gathered, the fighters told them to
carry out the sentence: Stoning to death for the alleged adulteress.

None
in the crowd stepped forward, said a witness to the event in a northern
Syrian city. So the jihadi fighters, mostly foreign extremists, did it
themselves, pelting Faddah Ahmad with stones until her body was dragged
away.

"Even when she was hit with stones she did not scream or
move," said an opposition activist who said he witnessed the stoning
near the football stadium and the Bajaa garden in the city of Raqqa, the
main Syrian stronghold of the Islamic State group.

The July 18
stoning was the second in a span of 24 hours. A day earlier, 26-year-old
Shamseh Abdullah was killed in a similar way in the nearby town of
Tabqa by Islamic State fighters. Both were accused of having sex outside
marriage.

The killings were the first of their kind in rebel-held
northern Syria, where jihadis from the Islamic State group have seized
large swaths of territory, terrorizing residents with their strict
interpretation of Islamic law, including beheadings and cutting off the
hands of thieves. The jihadis recently tied a 14-year-old boy to a
cross-like structure and left him for several hours in the scorching
summer sun before bringing him down -- punishment for not fasting during
the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.The group has also brutalized
Shiite Muslims and others whom it views as apostates. In neighboring
Iraq, Islamic State militants have driven members of the Yazidi
religious minority out of a string of towns and villages. Thousands of
the fleeing Yazidis have been stranded on a mountaintop for days, a
humanitarian crisis that prompted the U.S. to airlift aid to them this
week.

In
the space of just one week last month, according to Crif, the umbrella
group for France's Jewish organisations, eight synagogues were attacked.
One, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, was firebombed by a 400-strong
mob. A kosher supermarket and pharmacy were smashed and looted; the
crowd's chants and banners included "Death to Jews" and "Slit Jews'
throats". That same weekend, in the Barbes neighbourhood of the capital,
stone-throwing protesters burned Israeli flags: "Israhell", read one
banner.

In Germany
last month, molotov cocktails were lobbed into the Bergische synagogue
in Wuppertal – previously destroyed on Kristallnacht – and a Berlin
imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, called on Allah to "destroy the Zionist Jews …
Count them and kill them, to the very last one." Bottles were thrown
through the window of an antisemitism campaigner in Frankfurt; an
elderly Jewish man was beaten up at a pro-Israel
rally in Hamburg; an Orthodox Jewish teenager punched in the face in
Berlin. In several cities, chants at pro-Palestinian protests compared
Israel's actions to the Holocaust; other notable slogans included: "Jew,
coward pig, come out and fight alone," and "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas."

Across Europe,
the conflict in Gaza is breathing new life into some very old, and very
ugly, demons. This is not unusual; police and Jewish civil rights
organisations have long observed a noticeable spike in antisemitic
incidents each time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares. During the
three weeks of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009,
France recorded 66 antisemitic incidents, including attacks on
Jewish-owned restaurants and synagogues and a sharp increase in
anti-Jewish graffiti.But according to academics and Jewish leaders, this
time it is different. More than simply a reaction to the conflict, they
say, the threats, hate speech and violent attacks feel like the
expression of a much deeper and more widespread antisemitism, fuelled by
a wide range of factors, that has been growing now for more than a
decade.

"These are the worst times since the Nazi era," Dieter
Graumann, president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, told the
Guardian. "On the streets, you hear things like 'the Jews should be
gassed', 'the Jews should be burned' – we haven't had that in Germany
for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn't criticising Israeli
politics, it's just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else. And it's not
just a German phenomenon. It's an outbreak of hatred against Jews so
intense that it's very clear indeed."Roger Cukierman, president
of France's Crif, said French Jews were "anguished" about an anti-Jewish
backlash that goes far beyond even strongly felt political and
humanitarian opposition to the current fighting: "They are not screaming
'Death to the Israelis' on the streets of Paris," Cukierman said last
month. "They are screaming 'Death to Jews'." Crif's vice-president
Yonathan Arfi said he "utterly rejected" the view that the latest
increase in antisemitic incidents was down to events in Gaza. "They have
laid bare something far more profound," he said.

Nor is it just
Europe's Jewish leaders who are alarmed. Germany's chancellor, Angela
Merkel, has called the recent incidents "an attack on freedom and
tolerance and our democratic state". The French prime minister, Manuel
Valls, has spoken of "intolerable" and clearly antisemitic acts: "To
attack a Jew because he is a Jew is to attack France. To attack a
synagogue and a kosher grocery store is quite simply antisemitism and
racism".

Beware the enthusiasm shown by anti-feminists for international women’s rights in a fight about equality at home

When I wrote last week about the #WomenAgainstFeminism campaign,
I expected some pushback: arguing that women are a victimized class is a
surefire way to rile people up. But the theme of this recent criticism
was that American women don’t have legitimate grievances because other
women have it worse – and that’s telling.

One gentleman emailed to
say he wanted to send me “to a place like Saudi Arabia where women are
REALLY disadvantaged and oppressed”. Apparently women don’t have the
right to complain about discrimination unless it’s explicit and international.

Interestingly,
this guy is not the first to suggest that American women ought to stop
working for equality here and exclusively seek to help women abroad.
It’s amazing how many international women’s rights enthusiasts come out
of the woodwork when you dare suggest that there’s room for women’s
rights to advance in the US.

But
is that really the standard by which people want to judge equality? So
long as we have the right to vote, drive, go to school and work,
American women should shut our mouths and be grateful to American men
for allowing us to have that much?

The righteous fight for bare
minimums doesn’t have much of a ring to it. The goal of feminism is
justice – not to just be better off than other oppressed women. There’s
no such thing as equal by comparison.

The truth is that in spite
of the gains women have made over the years, we are still discriminated
against politically and culturally. Women are still attacked, raped, trafficked (sexually and otherwise), paid less than men, objectified, and denied our legal rights to abortion. I mean, we’re still debating access to birth control in the US – so let’s not overstate how good women have it.

From minimum wage to the environment to abortion, America is far more liberal than the media or the right admit

It is a persistent belief among many in the political and mediaestablishments,
fed by decades of right-wing propaganda, that the United States is a
“center-right nation” that finds progressives to be far too liberal for
mainstream positions of power.

If you look purely at electoral
outcomes, those who assert this appear to have a fairly strong point.
The last several decades of federal politics have been dominated by
center-right policies and truly left-wing politicians have been largely
marginalized (e.g., Bernie Sanders). Even Clinton and Obama — the last
two Democratic presidents who, theoretically, should be leftists — are
corporate-friendly moderates who have triangulated during negotiations
with Republicans to pass center-right policy compromises (e.g., Obama’s Heritage Foundation-inspired ACA or the Clinton Defense of Marriage Act compromise).

While
electoral results may support the idea of a center-right nation,
looking beyond electoral politics — which involve a mixture of policy
choices, party politics, fundraising and propaganda — and focusing
purely upon raw policy preferences leaves us with an entirely different
picture.

Here is a compilation of polling data from various
reputable American polling organizations, describing the policy
preferences of the Americans people over the last year.

Economic Issues

According to Gallup polling, 59 percent of Americans think that U.S. wealth “should
be more evenly distributed” among a larger percentage of the people
while only 33 percent thought that the current “distribution is fair.”
While this is down from the 2008 modern high point, where 68 percent of
Americans supported more redistribution, the public opinion of
redistribution has held a stable majority, if not super-majority, for
decades.

The fact that such a large number of Americans believes
that the distribution of wealth is currently too skewed toward the
wealthy is made far more relevant by the fact that they don’t actually
know just how skewed the wealth distribution has become. As explained by Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School,
Americans think that the current distribution of wealth is far more
equal (middle bar graph) than it actually is (top bar graph) — in short,
they recognize the problem, but lack an understanding as to just how
bad it has become.

According to Pew Research, 69 percent of Americans oppose any cuts to Social Security or Medicare,
even in order to cut the deficit, while only 23 percent support such
cuts. Additionally, 59 percent oppose cuts on programs assisting the
poor in order to address the deficit, while only 33 percent support such
austerity.

A multitude of polls have indicated that between 60 percent and 80 percent of Americans support increasing taxes on the wealthy,
depending upon how the question is worded and the polling venue — this
indicates that a majority of Americans support increasing taxes on
top-earners in order to reduce the deficit.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson